How To Manage Hyper-Growth With SD-WAN

In the 2018 Gartner CIO Agenda Report that is based on the views of over 3,000 CIOs, growth was identified as the top business priority by close to 60% of the CIOs. Why are CIOs focused on business objectives, such as market share and mergers and acquisitions? Isn’t that traditionally the realm of the CEO?

Business leaders have to rethink the network. Today, cloud, mobility and changing user expectations are making the network increasingly complex and unpredictable.Riverbed

Not today.

Today’s CIOs understand that IT is not the endgame. CIOs realize that virtualization of IT resources and expedited delivery of new digital services to end users worldwide can enable them to leverage exponential organic and inorganic growth, creating a sort of hyper-growth that can propel a company beyond its competitors. According to Gartner, “digitalization continues to advance, with enterprises seeking growth from digital business models where growth dimensions can vary with new markets and customers, higher margins, more-diverse supplier networks, greater public-sector funding, extension of the mission, etc.”

Business payback from growth initiatives is dependent on the ability of the enterprise to connect knowledge workers, share data, and deliver high-performance digital products and services, while accelerating time-to-market and keeping costs in check. But what does it take to deliver on these objectives?

Businesses are now required to do more with less. The network is at the center of the customer and employee experience. Business leaders have to rethink the network. Today, cloud, mobility and changing user expectations are making the network increasingly complex and unpredictable. Spinning up a server in the cloud just requires a quick swipe of the credit card, leading to Shadow IT. Furthermore, device-centric configuration is brittle and time consuming. To simplify this, businesses must adopt a software-defined approach, offering centralized orchestration and policy management— and must adopt networking that is software-defined, or known as SD-WAN in the industry.

The good news is that the right SD-WAN solution can provide businesses with the agility needed, and will align the network to the cloud and digital efforts. It offers unified connectivity and network management across an entire distributed enterprise, spanning local and wide area networks that run in satellite offices or retail stores, to the data center, to wide area networks and into the cloud. This, along with embedded security, optimization and visibility.

As an example, GHD, a global professional services company and Riverbed customer, merged in 2014 with North American engineering consultancy Conestoga-Rovers and Associates. Overnight they expanded their global workforce by 35%, adding 3,000 employees in 100 new office locations. GHD already has a complex IT landscape with thousands of business and technical applications — including bandwidth-intensive design tools — as well as a hybrid infrastructure footprint with traditional on-premises data centers, public cloud assets and GHD’s own private cloud.

To on-board this influx of employees and digital services, GHD decided to take a blended approach. Larger offices were brought on to the GHD network through more traditional approaches—a process that took a full year. For the large number of smaller offices, typically set up to be close to their clients, GHD needed a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy and maintain solution given the limited amount of IT resources at the locations. For these, GHD decided to use Riverbed’s SD-WAN offering SteelConnect.

The solution was everything traditional IT is not. The deployment was zero touch. GHD could preconfigure a device using a cloud portal before delivering to the remote physical sites. There, a non-technical person followed some very simple instructions, and plugged in the device. Everything was up and running in minutes, instead of sending an IT expert and waiting for days for the system to be up and ready. GHD estimates that if it had chosen a traditional networking approach, the project would have taken at least three months to complete— using the Riverbed SteelConnect solution, the timeframe was four weeks. In addition, with the upgrade, GHD expects to see savings of 75% of its global communications costs over the medium term.

Most importantly, the result is a GHD business that is more connected, with a more consistent network experience. “For the first time, end users have access to the full raft of our business services—just as though they were in a large office—and they really feel like they’re part of the same organization. This has made a tremendous cultural impact,” according to Elizabeth Harper, GHD CIO.

And the larger offices? Once GHD experienced the rollout of the smaller regional sites, GHD decided to connect the larger offices with SD-WAN. The cost benefit? $1M annually. As you can see, how well a business, like GHD, handles growth and the highly variable challenges that growth creates differentiates marketplace winners and losers. “We see SteelConnect as a key enabler in being able to integrate newer organizations more quickly,” said Harper.

See how Riverbed next-gen Cloud Networking solutions, including SD-WAN, can support your growing business.